I was a Customer Excellence Manager and ran a lot of Customer Journey Workshops and Design Thinking Workshops :) It was in-house so the clients usually approached us to solve a certain challenge. As the org wasn't that customer-centric yet and more traditional, at most times it was very eye-opening for them to workshop from the customer perspective. We conducted the workshops online as it was still the pandemic when I worked that job.

@Salah Bouchma We discussed action points in the end of each workshop that would translate into actual tasks. There was a project team made up from different individual contributors from different departments who worked in a Kanban-like fashion and their job was to take the tasks into their teams or collaborate to solve the tasks that came out of the workshops. Basically before this project team would start working on the tasks the tasks were shared with management to get buy-in and sign-off for the project team to invest the necessary resources for the tasks. It was really fruitful having this cross-functional project team because it was very clear that nothing from the workshops is lost this way and the responsible teams were kind of "forced" to take action. With this clear process in place most teams felt quite good and excited after the workshops. They enjoyed having the possibility to zoom out of their daily projects and look at the bigger picture in analyzing whole journeys and enjoyed the cross-department collaboration.

Sorry for getting back so late... You know how it sometimes it... Here's my thoughts from after the workshop. - We luckily had a great group of participants. You never know with externally recruited participants, whether they will be too shy or not "click" with one another. This bunch was great. Most arrived 10-15 mins earlier. I prepared a snack and drinks bar and they got a Kinder surprise egg (the ones forbidden in the USA) as a "welcome gift". This broke the ice and they started chatting over drinks and snacks even before the workshop had started. - I planned a brainstorming activity very early in the workshop and this worked great. They did silent brainwriting first and then we collected the ideas on the board. This helped them get into the mode and helped them articulate their thoughts and bounce off the other participants. - I had the PO of the project with me as a co-facilitator and this was of great help too. Not only because he could take the insights right away, but I also introduced him as the guy, who will make sure that all of your ideas are getting to the right people. As the workshop progressed the participants started joking with the PO and really got into the "everything is allowed to say/we can wish for anything today". They were voicing a rather provoking idea and would then add "(PO's name) my buddy here, will make sure that this will be exactly like that in the next car 😉". It made the participants feel really important and also heard that a member of the actual product team was there all the time, basically to do nothing but listen to them. - I started the journey activities with silent brainwriting, but as we progressed got away from it a little and only turned back to it when the discussions where getting a bit out of hand. In a professional setting I would have tried to untangle the different journey steps and journey swimlanes a bit more. You know how we usually say "We don't want to think about solutions yet". The participants thought in solutions all the time but it was still helpful so I just let them continue like that asking WHY they would prefer this solution to the proposed one and would note this down on post-its. - One participant was a bit pushy with their opinion. I tried to keep it nicely at bay with repeating again and again that this is their opinion and what the others think. It worked well, too. - I planned for breaks to be a bit longer but for most of them the participants sat back at the table before the timer had finished. So we just continued earlier. This meant we had some spare time in the end (with external participants they are booked and paid for a certain time so it makes sense to use it all up). Luckily, I prepared some additional discussion round questions. So always plan a bit of time-filler activity for cases like this. - In the end the participants said they had a great time and that time was flying. This was of course great feedback! :)

@Piotr Łysakowski @Courtney DeLaura @Sam Pettersson